A senior Catholic bishop has warned that if a significant number of people refuse to get the Covid-19 vaccine, more people may lose their lives to the virus.

Writing in The Irish Catholic Bishop Kevin Doran reassures the Faithful that there is nothing in Church teaching to prevent them from taking a vaccine, even if it was developed using cell-lines from aborted babies.

“Catholics are free,” he writes, “to use any Covid-19 vaccine that is approved for clinical use, on the understanding that they themselves do not approve of or consent to abortion for the purposes of biomedical research”.

While Dr Doran acknowledges that a decision on taking a vaccine is a matter of individual conscience, he insists it is also not simply a private matter.

“If significant numbers of people chose not to be vaccinated, for whatever reason, it would prove very difficult to achieve the required levels of immunity in the population. The result could be significant loss of life and serious illness in the community and especially among those who are most vulnerable, as well as long-term damage to social and economic life, which would impact on the population as a whole.

“This reality must inform any judgement of conscience. Any person who wishes to signal his or her rejection of the use of foetal cell-lines should consider whether there are other ways of doing so, than by refusing to avail of the vaccine,” Bishop Doran writes.

Both Pope Francis and Emeritus Pope Benedict received a covid19 vaccine on Thursday.

The Catholic Church has urged believers to get vaccinated while also holding it to be a matter of individual conscience.

The Church has also long appealed for vaccines to be developed in an ethical way, free of cell lines derived from aborted foetuses.

But it also accepts that, in the absence of freely available alternatives, there is no moral wrongdoing in taking a vaccine that is remotely connected with abortion.

The Vatican is using the Pfizer jab which was developed and produced without using foetal cell lines, although it was tested on a cell line that is thought to derive from an abortion in the 1970s.

On Sunday, Pope Francis threw his full support behind the drive to vaccinate.

“I believe that ethically everyone must take the vaccine. It is an ethical action, because you risk your own health, your life – but you also risk the lives of others,” the Pontiff said.

The U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision Tuesday reversed a federal judge’s injunction that had blocked rules requiring women to obtain an abortion pill from a doctor in person.

“The question before us is not whether the requirements for dispensing mifepristone impose an undue burden on a woman’s right to an abortion as a general matter,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote Jan. 12. “The question is instead whether the District Court properly ordered the Food and Drug Administration to lift those established requirements because of the court’s own evaluation of the impact of the COVID–19 pandemic.”

“Here as in related contexts concerning government responses to the pandemic, my view is that courts owe significant deference to the politically accountable entities with the ‘background, competence, and expertise to assess public health,’” Roberts said.

“In light of those considerations, I do not see a sufficient basis here for the District Court to compel the FDA to alter the regimen for medical abortion,” Roberts continued.

The normal requirement of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in place since 2000, is that the abortion pill be dispensed and administered in-person. The regulation is part of the REMS protocol, reserved for higher-risk drugs and procedures.

The Bon Secours Sisters, who ran the mother and baby home at Tuam, have offered “profound apologies” and acknowledged that children were buried in a “disrespectful and unacceptable way”.

The order also said it did “not live up” to its Christianity when running the Co Galway facility between 1925 and 1961 on behalf of the local county council.

“We failed to respect the inherent dignity of the women and children who came to the home. We failed to offer them the compassion that they so badly needed. We were part of the system in which they suffered hardship, loneliness and terrible hurt. We acknowledge in particular that infants and children who died at the home were buried in a disrespectful and unacceptable way. For all that, we are deeply sorry,” the congregation’s area leader Sr Eileen O’Connor said.

The sisters confirmed that they would participate in any redress scheme set up in response to the report. In 2018, the Bon Secours religious congregation offered €2.5 million towards the costs of a forensic excavation at the former Tuam mother and baby home.

Chapter 21 of the Report deals with the Regina Coeli hostel founded by the Legion of Mary. Before the 1970s, it says, “Regina Coeli was the only institution that assisted unmarried mothers to keep their infant”.

“Although the mothers who kept their babies were a minority until the 1970s, the proportion was undoubtedly much higher than for any other institution catering for unmarried mothers”.

It notes that children came to Regina Coeli with their mother, and remained with their mother; and “in a small number of cases a child might remain in Regina Coeli, while their mother was in hospital, prison or otherwise temporarily absent”.

It quotes a lengthy memorandum written in 1950 and submitted to the Department of Health by the founder of the Legion, Frank Duff. The document lays out the philosophy of the group, which was that mothers should be encouraged to keep their children permanently, a course that was “not hitherto possible to girls in their circumstances”.

While other institutions sought to separate mother and child, finding a job for one, and a foster home or industrial school for the other, in the case of the Regina Coeli, the mother was afforded every chance to grow in affection for the child, and become responsible for the child.

The Report notes that Duff “claimed that ‘As a result of the interaction of proper natural affection and the encouragement and facilities provided….a great proportion of the girls are not only prepared but determined to keep their child’.”

The Report also notes that Frank Duff was opposed to children being committed to industrial schools.

The publication of the report by the Commission of Inquiry into Mother and Baby and County Homes has been welcomed by the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Eamon Martin.

In a statement released yesterday he said he accepted that the Church was clearly part of that culture in which people were frequently stigmatized, judged and rejected.

“For that, and for the long-lasting hurt and emotional distress that has resulted, I unreservedly apologise to the survivors and to all those who are personally impacted by the realities it uncovers”, he said.

“I believe the Church must continue to acknowledge before the Lord and before others its part in sustaining what the Report describes as a ‘harsh … cold and uncaring atmosphere’”.

The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, said what happened in the mother and baby homes was “only one chapter in a shocking narrative that has gone on for some time”.

He said everybody involved in what had happened “has to stand up” and admit their responsibility.

University College London (UCL) has expressed “deep regret” for its role in the propagation of eugenics, alongside a promise to improve conditions for disabled staff and students and a pledge to give “greater prominence” to teaching the malign legacy of the discredited movement.

The formal apology for legitimising eugenics – the advocacy of selective breeding of the population often to further racist or discriminatory aims – is UCL’s latest effort to address its links to early eugenicists such as Francis Galton, who funded a professorship in eugenics at the university.

“UCL acknowledges with deep regret that it played a fundamental role in the development, propagation and legitimisation of eugenics,” the university said as part of its apology.

“This dangerous ideology cemented the spurious idea that varieties of human life could be assigned different value. It provided justification for some of the most appalling crimes in human history: genocide, forced euthanasia, colonialism and other forms of mass murder and oppression based on racial and ableist hierarchy.

“The legacies and consequences of eugenics still cause direct harm through the racism, antisemitism, ableism and other harmful stereotyping that they feed. These continue to impact on people’s lives directly, driving discrimination and denying opportunity, access and representation.”

A Department of Health ethical framework for operating during a pandemic makes clear doctors may have to make decisions on which patients should be prioritised for treatment.

Drawn up last March and updated in September, it says that under normal circumstances, all individuals have an equal claim to healthcare. However during a pandemic, healthcare resources, particularly critical care resources, are likely to become limited over time.

“Decisions should be principally based on the health-related benefits of allocation mechanisms. Thus, the starting point for any rationing decision is to consider which patients are most likely to benefit from the intervention.”

It says that “categorical exclusion, e.g. on the basis of age, should be avoided as this can imply that some groups are worth saving more than others and creates a perception of unfairness”.

“It is not appropriate to prioritise based on social status or other social value considerations, eg income, ethnicity, [or] gender. However, it may be ethical to prioritise certain at-risk groups and those essential to managing a pandemic for treatment.”

Northern Ireland’s Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) has launched a legal action against the UK government for not having commissioned a regime of abortion-on-request more than a year after the procedure was made legal in the region.

Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, is accused of unlawfully denying the rights of women, who experts warn are being forced to use “unregulated services” and to travel to high-risk areas during the pandemic, the Guardian reports. The NIHRC is also taking action against the Northern Ireland Executive and the region’s Department of Health.

Les Allamby, the head of the NIHRC, said the body was taking legal action after the secretary of state, the Northern Ireland Executive and the Department of Health had not taken responsibility for creating the regime.

In the absence of a Government run regime, the region’s five health trusts have established unfunded services led by a group of fewer than a dozen committed medics. Nonetheless, between April and the end of November 2020 they facilitated 719 terminations according to DoH figures.

The HSE has paused a pilot scheme to send out free home sexual health test kits after receiving almost 5,000 orders in less than a day.

Tests for chlamydia, gonorrhoea, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, syphilis and HIV were being offered to people in Dublin, Cork and Kerry in a partnership between the HSE and the UK-based SH:24, a free online sexual health service.

A spokeswoman for the HSE said 4,923 tests had been ordered between the service going live at 5pm on Tuesday and the temporary suspension the following day. SH:24 said that similar-sized areas elsewhere had received around 700 orders in the first month, whereas the Irish scheme’s uptake had been “unprecedented”.

Meanwhile, new research from Johns Hopkins University suggests oral sex with more than 10 partners raises a person’s risk of developing throat cancer by over four times.

The scientists also found having oral sex for the first time at under 18 was linked to an 80% higher risk of a later diagnosis, compared to those who became intimate when aged over 20.